Part 5

“Yes, so,” answered the other. He tried to put his own shapeless stumps together in the attitude of prayer and began to sing with the pilgrims now defiling before them in endless lines, “Praise! All praise to Thee! Praise, all praise to Thee, Lord God!” The pilgrims were passing by, now, in single file, each with his long white taper, burning yellow in the gray light of the gray day. Their voices were loud and personal, each one as he passed being heard for an instant alone. “Glory! Glory to Thee!” they all sang the propitiatory words together, over and over, a hundred times repeated--the old wrinkled peasants in their blouses; the elegant officers in their well-cut uniforms; the stout elderly merchants; the thin, weedy boys; the white-faced, shaven priests; the black men from Senegal with bushy, woolly hair; the tall, fair-haired man from England; the occasional soldier on leave in his shapeless, faded, blue-gray uniform. Above all their voices rose the silver bugle-like call of the priest, burning, devouring in its ardor, “Brothers! Brothers! with all your souls, now. GLORY BE TO THEE! Oh, Lord, save us, for we perish! Lord, our trust is in Thee. Praised be Thy name!”

With each clamorous exhortation, repeated clamorously by all those imploring voices, he lifted the multitude up another step toward the great moment of awe and faith. The tears were streaming down the faces of many of the women in the crowd. The little boy’s mother sobbed loudly, and prayed with all her might.

The march past of the innumerable men, the incessant flickering passage of their pale-yellow lights, the never-ending procession of their pale, anxious faces, became an obsession. It seemed that every one, everywhere in the world, was marching together, singing and praying, hoping against hope for a miracle.

“Isn’t it time to change my hands?” asked the little blind boy desperately. “I have heard so _many_ people pass. I am very, very tired.”

“No, it is not yet time to change,” said the other, leaning forward to look down the esplanade. “The procession with the Host goes very slowly because it stops before each sick person. They are not near yet.”

“My hands are very tired,” murmured the little blind boy, faintly. But he held his hands out still, praying with the others, as the priest directed them. “Lord help us, for we perish. Lord! Thou alone canst save us! Lord, say but one word and we are healed. Lord, say but one word. But one word, oh, Lord!”

He held his strengthless hands out as he was told, groping helplessly for the blessing he so sorely needed; his blind eyes turned docilely in the direction indicated to him; he repeated meekly in his feeble little voice whatever words he was told to say--and all around him thousands and thousands of other helpless, docile, suffering human beings in similar plight, did the same, desperately, their faces groping up toward the sky, their joined hands imploring, “Lord save us, or we perish!”

The pilgrims filed past continually, their eyes staringly fixed on the feeble light of their tapers, their voices torn out of their bodies by the ever-deepening fervor and hope of the shouted, passionate commands of the priest, calling, “Brothers! With all your soul pray for our sick! Lord, say but one word and they are healed! But one word, oh, Lord!”

“The blessing is very long in coming,” faltered the blind boy timidly, his face even whiter than at the beginning, his lips blue.

The pilgrims passed constantly, the heavy tramp of their feet shaking the chair on which sat the little paralyzed boy and the blind child, their hands outstretched. The men’s voices were hoarse and deep now, trembling with fatigue and emotion.

The perspiration streamed down the face of the priest as in piercing tones he exhorted the multitudes, “Brothers, with all your soul, pray! _Pray!_”

Presently, because he was a weak, sick little child, and because the blessing was so long in coming, the little blind boy fell asleep, his head on the shoulder of the paralyzed child.

Then all the care and anxiety and humiliation and sorrow left his little white face. It was perfect in a perfect peace.

The blessing had come.

_Evening._

Scattered all over the vast stretch of the esplanade, thousands of little lights flickered and moved about in the rainy darkness, all that could be seen of the immense multitude gathering for the evening procession. The top of the great, horseshoe-shaped, marble, inclined plane up which they were later to defile, was so high above the ground that not a sound reached there of all those human voices talking together in the dark, calling to each other, as people tried to find their friends in the obscurity, and to form groups that they might march together. The little lights they held were only slightly sheltered from the gusts of wind-driven rain by cheap paper shades and they flickered and flared up, and many were extinguished. Although many went out and were lighted again only once more to have the wind puff them into blackness, the number of lighted ones grew fabulously as the crowd assembled. The little yellow spots of life spread further and further, till around the foot of the huge inclined plane was an ocean of lights, heaving formlessly, with a futile, aimless motion like the sea, humanity lost in the darkness.

Then a faint murmur came up through the rain and darkness. Speaking voices are not heard far, but voices raised in song have wings. The crowd was beginning to sing.

It was also beginning to take shape. From the foot of the inclined plane out into the black esplanade, streamed two long files of light, purposeful, with the sharp, forward-piercing line of the arrow. The procession was beginning to form.

The murmur rose into a chant as the crowd, hearing the first notes, took it up, singing as they fell into line. The first of the lights advanced up the ascent toward the top, which was blazing with light from the illuminated front of the lofty church. Far, far behind, stretching twice around the immense esplanade and disappearing into the distant blackness of the endless avenue, the flickering lights were now in two lines, moving forward steadily.

The sound of voices grew louder, the advancing files were visible now, masses intensely black against the night.

The wind roared, the rain beat down. The voices suddenly rang out clear and vibrant, high above the confused roar of the singing multitudes below.

Then the glimmering blur of the faces in the reflected light of the candles shone through the rain; each dim figure, in a momentary transfiguration, was resplendent in the flare of light from the church, the voices shouted loud and strong, drowning out in their instant’s glory of individual life the hoarse chant of the vast crowd below. Then each figure passed forward out of the light and began to descend the inclined plane on the other side, going singing down into the blackness.

There were so many singing now that, although they all sang the same chant over and over, a chant in which recurs constantly the acclaiming shout of “Hail! Hail!” they were not singing in tune together nor even in time, nor even often the same words at the same time.

As the groups passed, each one was singing in its own fashion on a different key from those gone before and those following them. When this was too apparent, they sometimes stopped, listened, caught the note from the pilgrims nearest to them, and burst out again, this time in harmony. But for the most part they listened only to their own voices and to those of their friends, and sang lustily in a hearty discordance.--and so vast was the throng and so simple the joyful air they chanted, that from that monstrous discordance rose a strange and wonderful harmony like no other music in the world, with a deep pulsation longer than that of any other music, beating time, beating true.

They passed, shouting out loudly the confident words of their song; the young faces often laughing gaily in the shaking light of their candles, stopping to light the blown-out flames at the candles of their friends; the older people tramping forward resolutely, singing, often not noting that their one light had been blown out and that they were walking in darkness--no, not walking in darkness, because of the infinite number of lights about them, carried by their fellows; the young girls’ eyes glistening through the rain as they gazed upward toward the circle of white light at the top of the ascent; the old men’s eyes turned downward on the darkness to which they would descend; the occasional priest-leader beating time, marshaling the lines; the occasional children holding to their parents’ hands, their eyes blank and trustful, fixed on their candles, their pure lips incessantly shaping the joyful acclaiming shout of “Hail! Hail!”

Sometimes a group lagged behind, either because of the carelessness of the young people in it, or the fatigue of the old people, and there was almost a break in the line of lights. But always as they approached the moment of transfiguration, the ones who were behind hurried forward shufflingly to keep the line intact. The line was always intact.

The rain beat down on them, but they sang loudly and joyously, rejoicing in singing together; the wind tore at their garments and puffed at their frail, unprotected lights. Many went out. But there were always enough lights left in each group to light those of the others--if they wished.

Last of all I saw a strong young man whose light had been extinguished, holding out his lifeless candle to that of an old, poor, bent woman who, patiently, patiently, offered him her tiny, living flame.

SOME CONFUSED IMPRESSIONS

(_Near Château-Thierry, July, 1918_)

They were detraining in dense brown crowds at what had been the station before German guns had knocked it into a shapeless heap of tumbled bricks; they were pouring in on foot along the road from the west; and when I made my way along the main street to the river, I found another khaki-clad line leaving the little town, marching heavily, unrhythmically and strongly out across the narrow, temporary wooden bridge, laid hastily across the massive stone pillars which were all that remained of the old bridge.

An old, white-capped woman, who had been one of my neighbors in the days before the little town had known German guns or American soldiers, called out to me: “Oh, Madame! See them! Isn’t it wonderful! Just look at them! All day like that, all night like that. Are there any people left in America? And are all your people so big, so fine?”

“Where are they going?” I asked her, taking refuge for a moment in her doorway.

“To the front directly, the poor boys. They’ll be fighting in two hours--do you hear the big guns off there banging away? And they so good, like nice big boys! Their poor mothers!”

I addressed myself in English to a soldier loitering near, watching the troops pass, “So they are going to the front, these boys?” After a stare of intense surprise, a broad smile broke over his face. He came closer. “No, ma’am,” he said, looking at me hard. “No, these are the Alabama boys just coming back from the front. They’ve been fighting steady for five days.” He added: “My, it seems good to talk to an American woman. I haven’t seen one for four months!”

“Where are you from?” I asked him.

“Just from the Champagne front, with the Third Division. Two of our regiments out there were--” He began pouring out exact, detailed military information which I would not have dreamed of asking him. The simple-hearted open confidence of the American soldier was startling and alarming to one who had for long breathed the thick air of universal suspicion. I stopped his fluent statement of which was his regiment, where they had been, what their losses had been, where they were going. “No, no, I mean where are you from in the States?” I raised my voice to make myself heard above the sudden thunder of a convoy of munition-camions passing by and filling the narrow street from side to side.

“Oh, from Kansas City, Missouri. It’s just eight months and seven days since I last saw the old town.” (Thus does a mother count the very days of the little new life of her child.)

“And how do you like France?”

“Oh, it’s all right, I guess. The climate’s not so bad. And the towns would be well enough if they’d clean up their manure-piles better.”

“And the people, how do you get on with them?”

The camions had passed and the street was again filled with American infantry, trudging forward with an air of resolute endurance.

“Well enough, they don’t cheat you. I forgot and left a fifty-franc bill lying on the table of a house where I’d bought some eggs, and the next morning the woman sent her little girl over to camp to give it back. Real poor-appearing folk they were, too. But I’ve had enough. I want to get home. Uncle Sam’s good enough for me. I want to hurry up and win the war and beat it back to God’s country.”

He fell away before the sudden assault on me of an old, old man and his old wife, with the dirt, the hunted look, the crumpled clothes, the desperate eyes of refugees: “Madame, Madame, help us! We cannot make them understand, the Americans! We want to go back to Villers-le-Petit. We want to see what is left of our house and garden. We want to start in to repair the house--and our potatoes must be dug.”

I had passed that morning through what was left of their village. For a moment I saw their old, tired, anxious faces dimly as though across the long stretch of shattered heaps of masonry. I answered evasively, “But you know they are not allowing civilian population to go back as yet. All this region is still shelled. It’s far too dangerous.”

They gave together an exclamation of impatience as though over the futilities of children’s talk. “But, Madame, if _we_ do not care about the danger. We never cared! We would not have left, ever, if the soldiers had not taken us away in camions--our garden and vineyard just at the time when they needed attention every hour. Well, we will not wait for permission; we will go back anyhow. The American soldiers are not bad, are they, Madame? They would surely not fire on an old man and his wife going back to their homes? If Madame would only write on a piece of paper that we only want to go back to our home to take care of it--”

Their quavering old voices came to me indistinctly through the steady thudding advance of all those feet, come from so far, on so great, so high, so perilous a mission; come so far, many of them, to meet death more than half-way--the poor, old, cramped people before me, blind and deaf to the immensity of the earthquake, seeing nothing but that the comfort of their own lives was in danger. I had a nervous revulsion of feeling and broke the news to them more abruptly than I would have thought possible a moment before. “There is nothing left to Villers-de-Petit. There is nothing left to go back to.”

Well, they were not so cramped, so blind, so small, my poor old people. They took the news standing, and after the first clutch at each other’s wrinkled hands, after the first paling of their already ashy faces, they did not flinch.

“But the crops, Madame. The vineyards. Are they all gone, too?”

“No, very little damage done there. Everything was kept, of course, intact for camouflage, and the retreat was so rapid there was not enough time for destruction.”

“Then we will still go back, Madame. We have brought the things for spraying the vineyards as far as here. Surely we can get them to Villers-de-Petit, it is so near now. We can sleep on the ground, anywhere. In another week, you see, Madame, it will be too late to spray. We have enough for ours and our neighbors, too. We can save them if we go _now_. If Madame would only write on a piece of paper in their language that--”

So I did it. I tore a fly-leaf out of a book lying in the heap of rubbish before the ruins of a bombarded house (it was a treatise on Bach’s chorales by the French organist Widor!) and wrote, “These are two brave old people, inhabitants of Villers-de-Petit, who wish to go back there to work under shell-fire to save what they can of their own and their neighbors’ crops. Theirs is the spirit that is keeping France alive.”

“It probably won’t do you a bit of good,” I said, “but there it is for what it is worth.”

“Oh, once the American soldiers know what we want, they will let us pass, we know.” They went off trustfully, holding my foolish “pass” in their hands.

I turned from them to find another young American soldier standing near me. “How do you do?” I said, smiling at him.

He gave a great start of amazement at the sound of my American accent. “Well, how do you like being in France?” I asked him.

“Gee! Are you really an American woman?” he said incredulously, his young face lighting up as though he saw a member of his own family. “I haven’t talked to one in so _long_! Why yes, I like France fine. It’s the loveliest country to look at, isn’t it? I didn’t know any country could be kept up so, like a garden. How do they _do_ it without any men left? They must be awfully fine people. I wish I could talk to them some.”

“Who are these soldiers going through to-day?” I asked. “Are they going out to the front line trenches, or coming back? I’ve been told both things.”

He answered with perfect certainty and precision: “Neither. They are Second Division troops, from Ohio mostly, just out of their French training-camp, going up to hold the reserve line. They never have been in action yet.”

Our attention was distracted to the inside of a fruit-shop across the street, a group of American soldiers struggling with the sign-language, a flushed, tired, distracted woman shopkeeper volubly unable to conceive that men with all their senses could not understand her native tongue. I went across to interpret. One of the soldiers in a strong Southern accent said, “Oh golly, yes, if you _would_ do the talkin’ fo’ us. We cyan’t make out whetheh we’ve paid heh or not, and we wondeh if she’d ’low us to sit heah and eat ouh fruit.”

From the Frenchwoman, “Oh, Madame, please what _is_ it they want now? I have shown them everything in sight. How strange that they can’t understand the simplest language!”

The little misunderstanding was soon cleared away. I lingered by the counter. “How do you like our American troops, Madame?” I asked. “Very well, very much indeed, if only they could talk. They don’t do any harm. They are good to the children. They are certainly as brave as men can be. But there is one thing about them I don’t understand. They overpay you, often, more than you ask--won’t take change--and yet if you leave things open, as we always do, in front of the shop, they just put their hands in and steal as they go by. I have lost a great deal in that way. If they have so much money, why do they steal?”

I contemplated making, and gave it up as too difficult, a short disquisition on the peculiarities of the American orchard-robbing tradition with its ramifications, and instead sat down at the table with the Americans, who gave me the greeting always repeated, “Great Scott! its good to talk to an American woman!”

A fresh-faced, splendidly built lad, looked up from the first bite of his melon, crying: “Yes suh, a cantaloupe, a’ honest-to-the-Lawd cantaloupe! I neveh thought they’d _heahd_ of such a thing in France.”

They explained to me, all talking at once, pouring out unasked military information till my hair rose up scandalized, that this was their first experience with semi-normal civilian life in France because they belonged to the troops from Georgia, volunteers, that they had been in the front-line trenches at exactly such a place for precisely so many weeks where such and such things happened, and before that at such another place, where they were so many strong, etc., etc.

“So we neveh saw real sto’s to buy things till we struck this town. And when I saw a cantaloupe I mighty nigh dropped daid! I don’t reckon I’m likely to run into a watermelon, am I? I suahly would have to be ca’ied back to camp on a stretcheh if I did!” He laughed out, a boy’s cloudless laughter. “But say, what do you-all think? I paid fo’ty-five cents for this slice, yes, ma’am, fo’ty-five cents for a _slice_, and back home in Geo’gia you pay a nickel for the biggest one in the sto’!” He buried his face in the yellow fruit.

The house began to shake to the ponderous passage of artillery. The boys in khaki turned their stag-like heads toward the street, glanced at the motley-colored, mule-drawn guns and pronounced expertly, “The 43rd, Heavy Artillery, going out to Nolepieds, the fellows from Illinois. They’ve just been up in the Verdun sector and are coming down to reinforce the 102nd.”

For the first time the idea crossed my head that possibly their mania for pouring out military information to the first comer might not be so fatal to necessary secrecy as it seemed. I rather pitied the spy who might attempt to make coherent profit out of their candor. “How do you like being in France?” I asked the boy who was devouring the melon.

He looked up, his eyes kindling, “Well, I was plumb crazy to get heah and now I’m heah I like it mo’ even than I ’lowed I would.” I looked at his fresh, unlined boy’s cheeks, his clear, bright boy’s eyes, and felt a great wave of pity. “You haven’t been in active service yet,” I surmised.

Unconsciously, gayly, he flung my pity back in my face, “You bet yo’ life I have. We’ve just come from the Champagne front, and the sehvice we saw theah was suah active, how about it, boys?”

They all burst out again in rapid, high-keyed, excited voices, longing above everything else for a listener, leaning forward over the table toward me, their healthy faces flushed with their ardor, talking hurriedly because there was so much to say, their tense young voices a staccato clatter of words which brought to me in jerks, horribly familiar war-pictures, barrage-fires meeting, advancing over dead comrades, hideous hand-to-hand combats--all chanted in those eager young voices.

I felt the heavy pain at the back of the head which presages a wave of mortal war-sickness.

In a pause, I asked, perhaps rather faintly, “And you like it? You are not ever homesick?”

The boy with the melon spoke for them all. He stretched out his long arms, his hands clenched to knotty masses of muscles; he set his jaw, his blue eyes were like steel, his beautiful young face was all aflame. “Oh, you just get to _love_ it!” he cried, shaking with the intensity of his feeling. “You just _love_ it! Why, I _neveh_ want to go home! I want to stay over heah and go right on killin’ _Boches_ all my life!”

At this I felt sicker, stricken with the collective remorse over the war which belongs to the older generation. I said good-by to them and left them to their child-like ecstasy over their peaches and melons.

The artillery had passed. The street was again solidly filled with dusty, heavily laden young men in khaki, tramping silently and resolutely forward, their brown steel casques, shaped like antique Greek shepherd hats, giving to their rounded young faces a curious air of classic rusticity.

An older man, with a stern, rough, plain face stood near me. “How do you do?” I asked. “Can you tell me which troops these are and where they are going?” I wondered what confident and uninformed answer I would receive this time.

Showing no surprise at my speech, he answered, “I don’t know who they be. You don’t never know anything but your own regiment. The kids always think they do. They’ll tell you this and they’ll tell you that, but the truth is we don’t know no more than Ann--not even where we are ourselves, nor where we’re going, most of the time.”

His accent made me say: “I wonder if you are not from my part of the country. I live in Vermont, when I’m at home.”